The major political phenomenon of the past decade has been a popular revolt against the economic arrangements that took form at the end of the twentieth century. The revolt is global. It takes both left- and right-wing forms, and often presents itself as overtly anti-immigrant or otherwise ethnonationalist, but the undercurrent of deep economic dissatisfaction is always there. Inequality in the developed world has been rising steadily for forty years now. The aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 activated the politics of economic populism: in the United States, the rise of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other politicians on the economic left, plus the Tea Party movement and to some extent Donald Trump and his acolytes who rail against globalization, Wall Street, and the big technology companies. In Europe, there is Brexit, new nativist parties (even in Scandinavia), and the Five Star movement in Italy, among other examples. What all of these have in common is that they took the political establishment utterly by surprise. And all of them regard the establishment, and any consensus that it claims to represent, with contempt. The dynamic of this moment brings to mind the politics of the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, succeeding waves of the industrial revolution created (along with enormous and highly visible wealth) a great deal of displacement, exploitation, and want, which at first manifested itself in radical rebellions — in the United States they took the forms of agricultural populism and labor unrest. This was followed by a series of experiments in translating economic discontent into corrective government policy. Then as now, popular sentiment and electoral politics came first, and the details of governance came later. Most of the leading intellectuals of the Progressive Era were deeply uncomfortable with populism and socialism. The young Walter Lippman, in Drift and Mastery, called William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, “the true Don Quixote of our politics.” But Lippmann and his colleagues shared the view that private and institutional wealth had become more powerful than the state and that the imbalance had to be righted, so they set about devising alternate solutions. We are now in the early stages of a similar period of forging a new political economy for this still young century. It is going to be a large, long-running, and not very orderly task, but those who don’t take it seriously are going to find themselves swept away. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it probably is, to stipulate that economies are organized by governments, not produced naturally through the operations of market forces. National economies do not fall into a simple binary of capitalist or not; each one is set up distinctively. Government rules determine how banks and financial markets are regulated, how powerful labor unions are, how international trade works, how corporations are governed, and how battles for advantage between industries are adjudicated. These arrangements have a profound effect on people’s lives. The current economic discontent is a revolt against a designed system that took shape with the general assent of elite liberal and conservative intellectuals, many of whom thought it sounded like a good idea but were more closely focused on other issues to pay close attention to the details. To begin the discussion about a new system requires first developing a clearer understanding of the origins of the current one. In an essay in 1964 called “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?,” Richard Hofstadter noted that for half a century, roughly from 1890 to 1940, the organization of the economy was the primary preoccupation of liberal politics. Hofstadter meant antitrust to be understood as a synecdoche for a broader concern with the response to industrialism in general and the rise of the big corporation in particular. He was not mourning liberalism’s shift in focus; instead, he was typical of midcentury liberal intellectuals in thinking that the economic problems that had preoccupied the previous generation or two had been solved. And that view of the postwar decades still resonates even all these years later, in the economically dissatisfied political present. During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s “Make American Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better,” both backward-looking slogans, share the embedded assumption that at some time in the past, roughly when Hofstadter was writing, the American economy worked for most people in a way that it doesn’t now. But was that really true? And if it was, what went wrong? Most people would probably say that the economy really was better back in the mid-1960s — that it had earned, through its stellar performance, the conventional view that it was working well — and that what changed was globalization: in particular the rise of the United States’ defeated opponents in the Second World War, Japan and Germany, and previously unimaginable advances in communications and data-processing technology, and the empowerment of Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Arab countries. But if that is what most people think, it highlights a problem we have now in addressing political economy, which is a belief that economic changes are produced by vast, irresistible, and inevitable historic forces, rather than by changes in political arrangements. That is a momentous mistake. A more specific account of the political origins of the mid-century economy, and of what blew it apart, is a necessary precondition for deciding what to do now. In the presidential election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran on a program he called “The New Nationalism,” and Woodrow Wilson on “The New Freedom,” with the third major candidate, William Howard Taft, having a less defined position. This was the heart of the period when economic arrangements were the major topic of presidential politics. (The perennial Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, got his highest-ever total, 6 per cent of the vote, in 1912.) Advised by Lippmann and other Progressive intellectuals, Roosevelt proposed a much bigger and more powerful federal government that would be able to tame the new corporations that seemed to have taken over the